Windows Phone App Development for Beginners #1: Intro

published on: 12/19/2011 | Views: N/A | Tags: Beginners

by WindowsPhoneGeek

I am starting a new series of posts for beginners: "Windows Phone Application Development for Beginners" and this time I will use a completely different more informal approach. The purpose is to explain everything you need to know in order to get started developing Windows Phone applications in a simple and easy to understand way. 

• Windows Phone App Development for Beginners #1: Intro
• Windows Phone App Development for Beginners #2: Installing the Tools
• Windows Phone App Development for Beginners #3 Getting Help
• Windows Phone App Development for Beginners #4 First Visual Studio project
• Windows Phone App Development for Beginners #5 Basic XAML
• Windows Phone App Development for Beginners #6 Layout

NOTE: If you are a professional Windows Phone Developer you should probably stop reading now (this series if for beginners).

Who is this series for?

• This series is more for people that have no previous experience in programming at all and want to build fully featured mobile apps in the easiest and fastest way
• Absolute beginners
• People who do not want to read hundreds of pages in theory in order to build a simple app
• People who do not want to be professional developers but want to make money from mobile apps
• People who do not know what is Windows Phone
• People who wish programming was simple

Why developing for Windows Phone?

In short Windows Phone is the latest mobile OS developed by Microsoft. It offers a new user interface called Metro.

The Windows Phone Application Platform provides two frameworks for developing applications:

• The Silverlight framework for event-driven, XAML-based application development. I.e. you use Silverlight for building applications that you can submit to the marketplace.
• The XNA Framework for loop-based games. I.e. you use XNA to develop games that you can submit to the marketplace.

Here is how the Marketplace looks like: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/marketplace

You can register here: http://create.msdn.com The process takes up to 4 days and you must have a credit card in one of the eligible countries. The registration fee for developers is $99 per year (taxes are excluded). You can submit FREE(usually making money from ads) and paid apps/games.

According to the latest statistics Windows Phone is the most profitable platform for developers:

                                                                                                                                                                       Image source:TechCrunch

What is more, when developing for the Windows Phone you:

• receive all tools necessary for building your own apps for FREE
• Microsoft also gives FREE help to developers in various ways: forums, network of MVPs, open source projects, MSDN documentation and much more
• third party web sites also offer FREE windows phone development resources
• the Windows Phone development community is growing faster and having in mind that at the moment the Marketplace has only 41 000 apps it is much easier to be noticed here than in the Android or iPhone market
• you can even get a free phone from Nokia or Microsoft, because they give lots of phones to developers

That's it for now. In the next post you will learn how to start building your first "cool" Windows Phone app.

Hope the post was helpful.

You can also follow us on Twitter @winphonegeek

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